Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy but are willing to pay premium prices for. How do companies know how to grow? How can they create products that they are sure customers want to buy? Can innovation be more than a game of hit and miss? Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has the answer.

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change

The 21st century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic.

Exponential Organizations: New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It)

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

In his most ambitious work to date, Thomas L. Friedman shows that we have entered an age of dizzying acceleration - and explains how to live in it. Due to an exponential increase in computing power, climbers atop Mount Everest enjoy excellent cell phone service, and self-driving cars are taking to the roads. A parallel explosion of economic interdependency has created new riches as well as spiraling debt burdens.

Great leaders anticipate the future. But the reality is that the vast majority of people fear the unknown. Most would rather stick with the status quo than go somewhere new, especially because they know change is hard and risky. According to Nancy Duarte, acclaimed author of Resonate, and Patti Sanchez, a communications expert, change doesn't have to be so hard. With the right communication tools, leaders can inspire others to long for a brighter future and move them to make it a reality.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior

If you're like most people, you think that your choices and behaviors are driven by your individual personal tastes and opinions. You wear a certain jacket because you like the way it looks. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong. Without our realizing it, other people's behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion.

Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And the Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps - and inner mindset - he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his contacts list, people he has helped and who have helped him. And in the time since Never Eat Alone was published in 2005, the rise of social media and new, collaborative management styles have only made Ferrazzi’s advice more essential for anyone hoping to get ahead in business.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived, and it's not self-driving cars, solar energy, or artificial intelligence. It's called the blockchain. The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation - powered by blockchain technology - is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

A pioneer of content marketing, Joe Pulizzi has cracked the code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

In this book Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create lives that are both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of whom or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate - Discoveries from a Secret World

How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? Research is now suggesting trees are capable of much more than we have ever known. In The Hidden Life of Trees, forester Peter Wohlleben puts groundbreaking scientific discoveries into a language everyone can relate to.

Negotiating the Impossible: How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve Ugly Conflicts (Without Money or Muscle)

Harvard professor (and negotiation advisor to organizations around the world) Deepak Malhotra shows how to defuse even the most potentially explosive situations and to find success when things seem impossible. Malhotra illustrates key lessons using behind-the-scenes stories of fascinating real-life negotiations, including drafting the US Constitution, resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending bitter disputes in the NFL and NHL, and beating the odds in complex business situations.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

In this must-listen book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and businesspeople - both seasoned and new - that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called "grit". Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur "genius" Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success.

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber - these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins - except traditional cab companies, which are scrambling to survive.

Why do sales organizations fall short? Every day expert consultants like Mike Weinberg are called on by companies large and small to find the answer - and it's one that may surprise you. Typically the issue lies not with the sales team - but with how it is being led. Through their attitude and actions, senior executives and sales managers unknowingly undermine performance. In Sales Management. Simplified. Weinberg tells it straight, calling out the problems plaguing sales forces and the costly mistakes made by even the best-intentioned sales managers.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made Michael Lewis' work possible.

Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...Create a Mass of Raving Fans...and Take Any Business to the Next Level

The "mind-reading" system that is revolutionizing online business. Do you know how to find out what people really want to buy? (Not what you think they want, not what they say they want, but what they really want?) The secret is asking the right questions - and the right questions are not what you might expect. Ask is based on the compelling premise that you should never have to guess what your prospects and customers are thinking.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms

Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber, are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another group of customers. Economists call matchmakers multisided platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same for drivers and riders.

The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

Steve Case was on the leading edge of the Internet revolution when he cofounded AOL in 1991. He was an entrepreneur in a business that hadn't even been invented, yet he saw how significantly his efforts could change not only America but the world. In The Third Wave, Case uses his insights garnered from nearly four decades of working as an innovator, investor, and businessperson to chart a path for future visionaries.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel - and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time. With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives.

Oliver Nielsen says:"Finally a book about productivity that delivers!"

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career of studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

Publisher's Summary

In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that they've carefully built up and stored away. But many of us remain stuck in old practices, practices that could undermine us as we search for success and meaning.

In this revolutionary book, three doyens of the Internet age, whose path-breaking work has made headlines around the world, reveal the adjustments we must make if we are to take these changes seriously.

In a world of increasing risk and opportunity, we must understand the importance of pull. Understood and used properly, the power of pull can draw out the best in people and institutions by connecting them in ways that increase understanding and effectiveness. Pull can turn uncertainty into opportunity and enable small moves to achieve outsized impact. Drawing on pioneering research, The Power of Pull tells us how to apply its principles to unlock the hidden potential of individuals and organizations, and how to use it as a force for social change and the development of creative talent.

The authors explore how to use the power of pull to:

Access new sources of information

Attract likeminded individuals from around the world

Shape serendipity to increase the likelihood of positive chance encounters

Form creation spaces to drive you and your colleagues to new heights

Transform your organization to adapt to the flow of knowledge

The Power of Pull is essential listening for entrepreneurs, managers, and anybody interested in understanding and harnessing the shifting forces of our networked world.

What the Critics Say

“The Power of Pull examines the “how question”—how can we effectively address our most pressing challenges in a rapidly changing and increasingly interdependent world? In The Power of Pull, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison highlight fascinating new ways in which passionate thinking, creative solutions, and committed action can—and will—make it possible for us to seize opportunities and remain in step with change.” (Bill Clinton)

“The Power of Pull will do for our 21st-century information-age institutional leadership what Peter Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation did for industrial-era management. This book begins to create a body of learnable principles that will revolutionize our ability to access and work with knowledge flows.” (Newt Gingrich)

This is the same old drivel on social-networking (yeah, believe it or not, the concept is not new), wrapped in a desire to coin a phrase by dropping internet lingo, people's names, and current catchy buzzwords all over the place. Nothing enlightening or entertaining. Some people will say "oh, it's much more than social-networking," but sorry, it's not. Boring, worthless slop. This is the only audio book I have ever truly wished I could return. I will passionately disregard these authors in the future, and Pull every last byte of this book from my PC. It's a waste of time and space. Push it off your wish lists.

There is a lot of fantastic information in this book, if you can manage to stay focused to find it. What happens when you get three eggheads together in one book is often too much expounding and not enough editing. The powerful resumes of the three authors tell you they know what they are talking about. I only wish they would have not felt the need to prove it in such verbose fashion. The editing would have helped dispel the notion that the authors hold an "elitist" view of the world much more convincingly than the repetitive denials that they instead chose to leave in the text, IMHO. Dost thou protest too much? My advice: Listen in intervals, and whittle it down to the nuggets of wisdom by jotting your own notes, leaving out any mention of surfing or "dragging a backside hand". (That alone would have knocked off two hours from this book, I think.

This book was one steady stream of buzzwords, over-generalizations, and repetition. Do not waste a credit on this. If you want you can get the best ideas in this book from Seth Godin's Tribes, which is a much better, more engaging book.

Narrator is terrible. He is good for reading novels for kids. Pdf forms they keep on referring to in the audio book are not available anywhere. The audio book is useless without those pdf forms. Ideas are not clear in the book and I am so sorry to waste my money on such a book.

The book repeatedly refers to illustrations that they claim should be available in .pdf form "where you downloaded this book." Those illustrations are still not available from Audible, which means you are not getting the complete book.

It is very rare that I stop listening to a book. I can only think of one other time. I couldn't get past the first 1.5 hours on this one. Where to start? The first sign that this was all fluff was the repeated use of 'passionate', 'paradigm' and 'potential'. Over and over again. Get passionate people ... If you don't follow 'Pull' your passionate people will leave. If you do follow Pull you will realize your potential. How many ways can we restate this? MANY? The second was that they force this Pull vs. Push metaphor on everything. Things that worked lately - those are Pull. Things that didn't work - those are Push. But it's forced. They back up their metaphor by demonstrating the real differences (e.g., Tipping Point sets up a hypothesis and then gives examples that you can go - oh yeah, I see. - here they just add lots of words.) The third sign is that they are just restating current trends - the power of social networks, the internet, the rapid pace of development and how knowledge is changing at a higher frequency. They talk about the new 'digital technology'! If you didn't know that already, then this is the book for you! They talk about 'their research has shown', well I don't know what that research was. Another big tip off - look at their charts in the book. It's the same graph, over and over and over. Nice vague words like "Trajectory", "Leverage", "Pace" and "Access", "Attract" and "Achieve" all brought about by "The Big Shift"! And then you have the 'Edge' and the 'Core'. Oooooh! Did I just spoil the book for you? Then they 'warn' you about how this 'Pull' world might be scary, threatening, and uncertain, but you must forge ahead because the old ways are Push and they are going to take you to ruin.
I don't know these authors. Maybe, if I waited for another hour or so, I would have been enlightened. But I just couldn't. It actually hurt me to listen. So, I guess 'Pull' is just going to roll over me.

Hey, Audible! The authors say in the introduction that there is a companion pdf download showing their diagrams and illustrations available "where you downloaded this audiobook" -- but as of this writing on 19 May 2010, I don't see one anywhere. Please post it.